


Javelins & Jiros

by psiten



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Blink and You'll Miss It Implied Shiro/Keith (Voltron), Character Study, Episode: s06e03 Monsters & Mana, Existential Crisis, Gen, I Have Been Told To Warn You That This Is Kind Of Sad, Paladins Having Fun, References to Canonical Character Death, References to Haggar, References to Mind Control, Season/Series 06 Spoilers, Tabletop Role Playing Games, Voltron: Legendary Defender Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-27 16:02:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15028181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psiten/pseuds/psiten
Summary: "I just needed to take a mental break," was what he'd told the others when they asked why he wanted to play the game. The pilot of the Black Lion had a lot on his mind, and couldn't share any of it with his fellow warriors, no matter how much he wanted to.He ticked a box under, "Class," with a warm feeling over his stomach as he watched the favored skills and various bonuses fill in. It was a horrible choice for how he'd allotted the base stats the random number generator had given him, but that was fine. It was a game, right? "I want to be a paladin!" he announced to the room.(I'm sure you already know exactly what this story is, but that's okay. Join me in the feels. Tagged for spoilers becausethere are spoilers. You have been warned.)





	Javelins & Jiros

**Author's Note:**

> Although the official spelling of that last Paladin's name was "Gyro" according to the subtitles, I'm purposely using the spelling Jiro because I don't believe in coincidences. In Japanese, Shiro and Jiro would be spelled using exactly the same kana with the single exception that "Jiro" adds a mark called a [dakuten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakuten_and_handakuten) to turn the first character from an unvoiced sound to a voiced sound. In katakana, for example, シロ for Shiro becomes ジロ for Jiro. Pronunciation-wise, it also bears a strong resemblance to the common Japanese name, Jirou (the -ou is pronounced like a lengthened o sound). The meaning of the Ji- kanji in Jirou can mean "next" (次郎) or "two" (二郎). There are other possible meanings for Jirou as well, but it just seemed like too much of a coincidence to me that a man of Japanese descent (who might not know Japanese, but again it's a big coincidence to choose that if he doesn't) would happen to name his "sequel character" something that _could_ basically mean "next/second guy" and is literally the smallest spelling shift possible as a pronunciation change... but all of that is an accident because he was actually just naming him for a Greek sandwich that happened to rhyme (even though that kind of gyro isn't really pronounced that way), or possibly naming him after a spinning motion (even though that kind of gyro _also_ isn't pronounced that way)...
> 
> Anyway, long story short, I headcanon that he meant the name as Jiro, so that's what I'll be using here. I appreciate your understanding!

     The holotable displayed a stereotypical fantasy tavern while Pidge and Hunk waited for him to tick the boxes on his character file. This game stirred memories that he knew weren't his, but that he wanted to have -- memories of someone he almost was, filtered through the mindlink attached to his nervous system through the mechanical arm Haggar had grafted onto him.

     Memories of someone he should have been, and maybe could have convinced himself he still was if the fuzzy, hollow recollections of years ago hadn't felt so much less real than the headaches where he blacked out, lost control, and woke up in a different part of the castle with the certainty that he'd done something he ought to warn the Paladins about.

     Memories of someone saying, "Geez, Shiro, how do you always manage to roll a twenty when your stupid half-elven Ranger-slash-Bard ought to die? You are too fucking lucky," and him answering, "Language, Keith!" but meaning... something else.

     Those were better than the real memories, the ones he'd told himself on good days might only be a nightmare, of Haggar and her experiments. "The Champion may have managed to break my hold," she'd told him once, "but you won't have that power, Kuron. Know this: only I can reach the Champion's mind now that Zarkon is dead, and only I have the power to feed his shadow into you. My link to you is your only link to him. Break my spells, if you can, and you die. And if you're anything like him at all, the one thing he could never do was die."

     He'd had enough bad days recently to realize those nightmares were real. He wished he could warn them, but even if he'd known what to say, the controls Haggar had clamped on his brain wouldn't let him.

     Maybe he wasn't quite thinking straight when he entered the name, "Takashi Shirogane," under character name, but in the end, it was kind of right. That was his character, the person Haggar had made it clear he wasn't, even if he should have been, so he kept it. And the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to _be_ Takashi Shirogane for awhile, not just look like him and talk like him and fight like him, and fly his lion by some miracle he still couldn't believe. He -- the Shiro without a name of his own, because he sure as hell wasn't named Kuron -- wasn't sure what was the truth, but he knew what wasn't the truth. The lie. The happy fantasy he couldn't indulge in when real stakes were on the line.

     He ticked a box under, "Class," with a warm feeling over his stomach as he watched the favored skills and various bonuses fill in. It was a horrible choice for how he'd allotted the base stats the random number generator had given him, but that was fine. It was a game, right? "I want to be a paladin!" he announced to the room.

     Hunk, Pidge, and Coran all zipped behind him to watch him pick his other skills and distribute the points he got for starting at level four.

     "Seriously?" Hunk asked. "A paladin?"

     Pidge squinted at the rest of the sheet, including the name he'd picked. "With all the things you could pretend to be, you want to be _yourself_?! _Lame._ My character would never party up with a boring-ass hurley--"

     "Language, Pidge! And really? _A hurley_?!"

     "--who can't roleplay. I _will_ leave your ass in the tavern if you're boring. Right, Hunk?"

     "Uh," Hunk stalled, taking the temperature of the room and clearly deciding he was more scared of Pidge. "Right. Yes. No hurleys here...! Um, what's a hurley again? Is that, like, an Altean thing? That... wasn't the swear word, right?"

     Shiro pointed out all the details he'd been adding to the computerized card with his fictional Takashi Shirogane on it. "Look, I'll have a backstory and everything, Pidge. I'll be roleplaying. Besides, people playing actual barbarians shouldn't call other people hurleys."

     " _I'm a dwarf._ "

     "And _I'm_ a paladin," Shiro said, clicking the "Submit" button and watching his character's holomodel appear with the armor he'd selected. He could practically feel Haggar eye rolling on the other side of their mental link. Her hold on his actions loosened as she paid less attention than she normally would when he was with the other Paladins of Voltron and could -- theoretically -- tell them anything about why he'd been sent here.

     Why he'd been made.

     But he couldn't risk telling them about the flashes he saw of the cloning facility whenever he got one of his headaches. He couldn't warn Pidge to look in the computer for viruses, or tell Coran he might want to start cycling shield frequencies. Any time he even thought about saying something, he felt Haggar's hold clench tighter, and the words choked in his throat. Just because he was thinking about it, she was watching again. He could feel it. She'd never let him rest if he tried to sneak a word past her now.

     Then again, he thought as he listened to Hunk and Pidge asking Coran about the crystal they'd found in the woods, if Haggar didn't know what he was saying, she wouldn't know to stop him from trying. He had to make up a backstory right?

~//~

     "Yeah, we walk out in the middle of his sentence," Pidge said with a groan, pushing her figurine and Hunk's toward the tavern door.

     Shiro stopped his story short. Had he been _too_ secretive about trying to tell them who he really was? He'd have to try something else, but first they had to not leave without him! "I... I try to block their exit to keep talking to them!" he said.

     "All right, that's an opposed roll..." Coran studied the board and announced, "Shiro, you're flat-footed, so you'll get your D20 and your dexterity modifier with a -2 penalty, and you take another -2 penalty for being behind the table. Meklavar, since you're on the move already, roll up your D20 plus your dexterity modifier."

     "Ah, crap, dex is my dump stat," grumbled Pidge, but she rolled her die and got a seven. "Okay, I guess that's a six, then."

     Which at least gave him a chance. He had a dex mod of +2, so that would get rid of two points worth of penalties. He blew on his die for good luck, shook it, and rolled.

     Pidge's arms shot into the air as Coran announced, "Well, that's a natural two, so it looks like you rolled a zero. Sorry, Shiro. Block and Meklavar leave the tavern while you're struggling to get your cape out from where it's stuck on your chair."

     "Well, I run after them! I want to help fight the evil wizard!"

     Clearly, roleplaying games weren't as natural as the Shiro in his memory thought they were, especially since he didn't remember any other roleplaying game letting invading mice kill your character. Still, there was no arguing with house rules. He was just going to have to make another character.

      _Another paladin_.

     Shiro _had_ to be a paladin. Why would he want to be anything else?

~//~

     Fighting their way through the tomb of horrors, he'd almost forgotten he was looking for a way to send a message, and ended up just... having fun. Not least because everybody got to mock Lance for _clearly_ compensating for something by making Pike a half-wolf. Allura asking what was wrong with his ears on day one sure had left a mark!

     "Wow, a blazing sword," Shiro gasped at the dancing flames on the greatsword his figurine had picked up in the treasure room.

     "All right, everybody," Coran said out of nowhere. "I'm going to need you all to make a spot check. That'll be D20 plus your Wisdom, plus your ranks in Spot. You all get a -4 penalty for low light. Shiro, you're distracted, so that's another -5 for you."

     Apparently the adventure wasn't over! Neat!

     "Was... I supposed to take ranks in Spot?" Shiro asked. It'd seemed so much more sensible to only get his favored class skills, since the points went further.

     "Ooh, I've got Spot!" Allura crowed.

     Lance squinted at his character sheet. "Wait, where are the skills again? Was I supposed to do something with these when we leveled up?"

     Hunk winced, and Pidge buried her face in her hands. Coran did his own roll in the corner and announced, "Well, I've got the number to beat over here. Come on, we don't have all day."

     Pidge got the first roll with 18. "Minus four is fourteen," she announced, grinning at her near-perfect roll. "With ranks, that comes to twenty! Aw yeah!"

     "Uh, I've got a twelve, so minus four for darkness plus two for my Wis mod is ten, and another five for Spot ranks is fifteen?" said Hunk.

     Lance's die came up a natural one, again. "Great. I'm screwed!"

     Allura, rolling a 4, didn't do much better. "Well, this is technically a three after my modifier, isn't it? Despite the penalties? And my ranks in spot would make it a twelve..."

     "How did you get a Wisdom modifier of +3?!" Pidge shouted, then narrowed her eyes at Coran. "Are you _sure_ you're giving her the same XP you're giving the rest of us?"

     Shiro had his wisdom modifier at +1, so at least he wasn't completely out of luck. Or so he thought, before he rolled a 13. "Well, that works out to a five, I guess?"

     "All right, all right," Coran said, looking at his notes. Pidge leaned in eagerly to hear what she'd seen. "None of you see anything, but a vague instinct causes Meklavar, Block, and Valayun to step away from danger. Not you, though, Shiro, nor you, Pike. Gonna need you to make your reflex saves, all right?"

     He wasn't sure he was comfortable with Coran asking that about something he couldn't see. The feeling only got worse when Coran rolled his die again, and it came up a natural 20. "Oh, yeah, you'd better make that reflex save a good one. A critical hit'll do you double damage. And you're flat footed since it's taken you by surprise, so -2 again."

     This time, Lance rolled a 19. "All right!" he yelled, throwing his hands in the air. "And I got mad reflex stats, so guess whose save is a 24! Yours truly!"

     His turn.

     At least being level seven meant he got +2 to reflex saves now. Wishing his hardest, he shook the D20 again, because if he wanted to keep playing, then what he absolutely had to do was not die. In the back of his head, he tried to ignore Haggar's whispers in his memory: " _The one thing he could never do was die_."

     This wasn't real life, he told himself. He wasn't some mythic Champion, not really, just a half-formed stand-in, but this was a game, and he could be the Champion, the Paladin Shiro, if he wanted to.

     The roll came up a ten. Not bad! So, the -2 canceled out his dexterity modifier, and he added his plus two bonus. "Twelve?" he asked Coran, hoping it was enough.

     "A blinding bolt of lightning shoots out of the darkness. Pike twists out if its way just in time, but Shiro is engulfed in a swirling vortex..."

     Shiro assumed that meant that twelve wasn't enough.

     The holographic magic lightning swirled around his figurine. Staring forlornly at the 54 hit points he'd built up all session ticking away to a red zero, Shiro whispered. "I'm... dead." A little animation of his character crying, falling over, and morphing into a gravestone came up on his character sheet, over a button that said, "Create new character?"

     Over at the table, Coran whisked away his statue. "Well, Block, if you remembered to equip a resurrection staff--"

     "Nope," said Hunk. "Sorry, Shiro."

     Already tapping away on his character sheet, Shiro waved away the apology. "Don't worry about it. I can make a better character. Just give me a second." And you know what? He wasn't going to name his character "Takashi Shirogane" this time. He wanted a name that didn't belong to anybody else. Dang it, he was going to _not_ pretend to be the Champion for two seconds!

     "A towering figure with red hair emerges from the shadows," Coran said, "Block, Meklavar, you recognize the innkeeper who told you where to find the tomb of horrors..."

     Coran's monologue was probably plot relevant, but he took a few seconds to focus and put his rank points in skills he could probably use more than the ones he'd had before, plus he had a better idea of how to assign his base stats now. He finished right before it looked like the battle was about to start, and dropped his new character into the fight.

     "I am Shiro's twin brother, Jiro!" he announced, since, really, it felt better than thinking of himself as the Champion's off-brand copy. "I'm here to complete Shiro's quest!"

     Jiro. He liked how that sounded.

     "A paladin again?" Pidge groaned, but it didn't melt the smile on his -- or Jiro's -- face as he decided what he wanted to do when his turn came up.

     "I _want_ to be a paladin."


End file.
